“Benefits for the Workplace of the Future”

The workforce of the future promises to be very different from that of the past. A generation ago, there were few workers over the age of 65, but in the future we will see many more employees remain on the job longer than ever before. At the same time, as global markets grow more closely integrated, companies are having to reinvent the workplace, which requires more skilled, more reliable, and more flexible employees. “Benefits for the Workplace of the Future,” the latest publication from the Wharton School’s Pension Research Council, explores how workforce and workplace changes are reshaping employee benefits and what these trends portend for the future.

An increasingly diverse range of workers and new types of companies are redefining what it means to be an employee, what it means to offer someone a job, and how to compensate workers. These changes are spurring nontraditional benefits, such as child and elder care, flexible medical benefits, employee assistance programs, and investment education. Major developments in the pension and health care arenas provide new opportunities and challenges for rank-and-file workers as they are asked to take on more responsibility for their own benefits design.

Contributors to the volume evaluate these trends and their implications. They chart new methods for developing benefits plans, provide assessments of past trends and forecast future benefit challenges. The book, co-edited by Olivia S. Mitchell, professor of insurance and risk management and executive director of the Pension Research Council, will be invaluable to those who seek to structure and benefit from well-designed compensation packages.

Penn Current Express

Quoted Recently

“As we know from the research, the performance of a large firm is due primarily to things outside the control of the top executive. … We call that luck. Executives freely admit this—when they encounter bad luck.”

—J. Scott Armstrong, a professor of marketing at the Wharton School, on how executives can influence a company’s value. Limited research on the topic has mostly found that broader market forces often have a bigger impact on a company’s success than an executive’s actions. (The New York Times, Feb. 7, 2015)